"Varan the Unbelievable" is the 1962 re-edited, shortened, rescored and retitled version of the 1958 Toho kaiju film, Daikaijū Baran, directed by Ishirō Honda.

For the American market, Crown International Pictures released this heavily re-edited adaptation starring Myron Healey, as a double feature with the re-edited and retitled East German/Polish science fiction film, "First Spaceship on Venus." Unfortunately, almost all of Akira Ikufube's terrific score was jettisoned in the process and replaced with library cues from Albert Glasser's scores for "Teenage Caveman" and "The Amazing Colossal Man."

This copy presents the film in an ersatz 16x9 "widescreen" version. The raw material for the American video was a pan and scan version, already seriously compromised. I used the Tokyo Shock DVD for the Japanese scenes but it, too, needed to be blown up and cropped to fill the 16x9 image. Still, I find the result to be much more watchable than the blurry, public domain versions currently available on low-priced DVDs.

A few small mysteries: Several scenes in the American version appear no where on the Tokyo Shock DVD, including two shots of "Varan," two young Japanese announcers (speaking in Japanese) and two shots of Japanese police directing panicked crowds that seem to come from another Toho film of the period. At least I know it wasn't Rodan! Also, in Crown International's re-edit they flopped several scenes left to right, making those shots difficult to find in the Japanese version. The Howard Anderson Company added explosion flashes, mist, smoke, and flames to several shots. Sometimes I used the Americanized scenes where these added opticals seemed to contribute to the film, and sometimes I stayed with the Japanese originals. There is also stock footage of tanks, a formation of planes, and an airport in daylight that appear only in the American version.

So this version, while not for purists of any stripe, does represent an accurate, reformatted  copy of the American edit. It will have to do until someone releases a video transfer of a proper widescreen print.

By the way, why didn't Crown International conform their script to the title. In no place in the film is the monster referred to as Varan. Instead, it's inexplicably called Obaki (as far as I can tell; not a Japanese word!) throughout.